We’ve been assessing the state of Heart of the Swarm balance recently, and while our data shows that balance at lower skill levels is quite even, we’ve noted some concerns at the highest levels of play. We’re seeing that Terran looks slightly stronger than the other two races, and Zerg is underperforming slightly in both matchups.

As suggested by pro players and members of the community, we feel the map pool in Season 3 contributed a lot to these racial differences and we’re going to be making changes next season to help with this. Our goal for the upcoming season is to have a good mix of maps that are balanced as well as some that slightly favor specific races. We’re currently working towards finalizing the 2015 Season 1 map pool and we’re hoping that we can update to the new ladder map pool later this month.

Additionally, we’ve been considering potential balance changes to help address these issues. One area we’ve been keeping close tabs on that we believe we can help improve balance is the strength of the Widow Mine in TvP. We believe the direction of our last balance update was correct, but we wonder if the actual numbers were slightly too much. We’re currently thinking of testing the following change on a balance test map: